Catherine Richards
Born in Ottawa in 1950
Lives and works in Ottawa (Ontario)

To be shown, the work Method and Apparatus for Finding Love
(2000-) must be concealed. It must be hidden away from prying eyes,
because it is a patent application; its content, comprised of a text
and images about love, must be kept secret. Its subject, love, by
definition an intimate exchange between two persons, is revealed only
through an intricate game of dissimulation, revelation and demonstration,
means by which men and women express this feeling. We must get quite
close to the display before its opaque glass becomes transparent,
allowing us to view a patent application. In a display case, the application
seems inaccessible and distant; no longer an everyday text, it is
a protected document. In fact, our access to it is only partial, for
like its subject, it must be at once cleverly revealed and hidden,
much in the way that a patent signifies ownership of an idea or an
invention that merits protection. On the walls, linear drawings recall
the works of the Masters; Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da
Vinci (1483-1490) and Saint Sebastian by Rubens (1615) are
among the best known of these. And, as we more carefully inspect them,
we notice that technological elements have been superimposed on the
drawings: earrings, nose studs, nipple clips, etc.

A quote on the wall accompanies the enlarged copies of the drawings:

The Drawings are objected to because
they contain offensive pictures and/or material. Specifically Figures
1, 5, 11, 12, 13 are considered to contain such material and are therefore
requested to be deleted. (1)

Method and Apparatus for Finding Love is a reflection of the
artists continuing examination of the relationship between physics
(electromagnetism), emotions, and digital communication technology.
But the work of art itself is a text  a conceptual work
if ever there was one. It is a patent application describing a method
and device to find love, to be manufactured using electronic and digital
components. As a patent application, the text must rigorously describe
the equipment and technical processes involved, yet it dwells on a
painstaking description of the human mechanics and psychological backdrop
to love and a microanalysis of the winding path that desire takes
through exhibition and deception, display and concealment. A very
strange patent application indeed, and one that cites Marcel Duchamp
and his Large Glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even (La mariée mise à nue par ses célibataires,
même) (1915-1923) as prior art. It is a sort of treatise
on the art of loving and contains references to Shakespeare, Chaucer
and Ovide  we should also add Stendhal to this list 
with respect to the unreliability of intermediaries in amorous negotiations.
It is a remarkable, one-of-a-kind text that is both complex and intriguing.

This discourse on the art of love, under the auspices of a patent
application, nevertheless presents an in-depth analysis of this art.
The passage meticulously describing the risk of deceit that accompanies
any overt method is a literary jewel. The following is just one of
many excerpts I could have chosen:

Another difficulty [of overt methods]
is one inherent in all overt methods: people rarely know what they
want, or they deceive themselves. The flaw here is that courting is
seen as a form of shopping, in which the wise shopper works from a
list, and conscious mediation in producing the list increases motivation
to self-deception. There is a body of philosophy that holds that self
deceit can be neutralized by the program know thyself,
although no embodiment of this program is known. Its ultimate goal,
if feasible, is purification or elimination of desire: this would
reduce the market for our device. We do not believe that this is likely
to be a serious problem given the antiquity of the program and the
paucity of the results. (2)

The work underscores the profound loneliness that exists in our media-driven
societies dedicated, ironically, to communication and information.
And if this irony is denouncing anything, it is not so much the way
that technology is changing our lives, but rather the danger that
the private ownership of the means of production represents
in this domain. It may be an old-fashioned expression, but it speaks
volumes. In this instance, it suggests that a persons fate may
be decided by a few individuals able to harness it for their own profit.
Suffice to say that this text is, in a certain sense, a caricature
of ourselves, revealing the extent to which we are threatened by the
privatisation of human intimacy (love) as is already the case in the
gene patenting of genetically modified species. The patent becomes
one more territory both invested in and investigated by the artist,
as were the curiosity cabinets in Virtual Body (1993) and a
Faraday cage in Curiosity Cabinet at the End of the Millennium
(1995). The patent provides Richards with an extraordinary opportunity
to entwine both science and art as agents of desire. (3)
While science is regarded as the paradigm of the rationality and objectivity
in knowledge, art has always been associated with eroticism or, as
Nietzsche put it, sensuality. With this text, Richards draws us along
slippery, unfamiliar ground, where technology and desire intertwine
in a discourse on the embodiment of science and technology.

In collaboration with Martin Snelgrove
Copy of the patent application in a vitrine, glass, and electronic
circuits, sensors, line drawings from paintings by Masters (Bronzino,
da Vinci, da Vignola, Michelangelo, Rubens) transferred to paper,
quote from the patent examiner
Collection of the artist

Biography

Catherine Richards is a professor in
the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. She studied
English literature and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from York
University in 1971 and a B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of
Ottawa in 1980. In 1991, together with Nell Tenhaaf, she organised
the Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus at the Banff Centre for the
Arts in Alberta, one of the first public art events in Canada to examine
virtual realities and the interfaces between technology and the human
body. This innovative project in art and new technology earned her
the 1992 Corel Prize from the Canadian Conference of the Arts. In
1993, she won the Petro-Canada Award in Media Arts from the Canada
Council for the Arts for her outstanding use of new technologies in
media arts and, more specifically, for Spectral Bodies (1991).
That same year, her interactive work Virtual Body was presented
at the Antwerp 93 Festival in Belgium. The Canadian Centre for
the Visual Arts, affiliated with the National Gallery of Canada, awarded
her a fellowship in 1993-1994, and in 1994-1995, her Charged Hearts
(1997) project was partially funded through the Gallerys Claudia
De Hueck Fellowship in Art and Science. Also in 1995, her Curiosity
Cabinet at the End of the Millennium was commissioned for the
exhibition Self Determination/Body Politic at the Gemeentemuseum in
Arnhem, the Netherlands. Her most recent works, I was scared to
death/I could have died of joy (2000), Shroud/Chrysalis
(2000), and Method and Apparatus for Finding Love (2000) are
an extension of her exploration into the links between the body, emotion,
and new technology. Her work was also shown in 2004 at the Biennale
of Sydney, Australia.